Long wavelength oxygenic photosynthesis

Photosynthesis uses sunlight to provide the energy for life. It takes CO2 from the atmosphere to make the polymers that are the fuels and building blocks of living things. The electrons required are taken from water and the oxygen released energizes the atmosphere. The appearance of “oxygenic” photosynthesis allowed complex life to evolve and changed the face of planet itself.
In the history of life much of the biomass produced, either directly or indirectly by photosynthesis, was sequestered in rocks, lowering atmospheric CO2 concentrations, and establishing a climate appropriate for the current inhabitants. Mankind has caused the climate crisis by reversing photosynthesis due to an inordinate enthusiasm for combustion.
Because of the poor efficiency of photosynthesis, biofuels cannot (at present) replace fossil fuels. We need the food as food and the trees as trees. However, by understanding photosynthesis, we can modify it for more efficient food production, for more efficient photosynthesis-based biotechnologies, and we can learn lessons from nature to improve technologies such as solar cells.
In recent years, improvements in understanding photosynthesis and new genetic tools have allowed desirable traits to be put into crops, resulting in marked yield improvements. One approach, much discussed but not yet implemented, is to extend the solar spectrum useable by plants by engineering the chlorophyll pigments to collect light at longer wavelengths: to shift from the red light to far-red and even the near-infrared.
Evolution has already done this engineering job at least twice in cyanobacteria, blue-green photosynthetic bacteria, in which oxygenic photosynthesis evolved. These two low-energy long-wavelength photosynthetic modes were a surprise to many scientists as it was thought that red light was the low energy limit for the energy-demanding process of oxygenic photosynthesis and yet biology had found two distinct ways of breaking this red limit.
One has the usual chlorophyll-a pigments replaced by long-wavelength chlorophylls-d. The other has only 10% of the chlorophyll-a molecules replaced by another even longer wavelength pigment, chlorophyll-f. Both systems are as active as the conventional photosynthesis but use less energy.
The team members are leading experts on far-red photosynthesis and have made many breakthroughs in this field. Here they have joined forces and brought in other specialists to make a team and project unmatched in the world. We will use genetic, biochemical, and biophysical (spectroscopic, structural, and computational) approaches to study and compare the three types of photosynthesis, the two long wavelength kinds and the conventional visible light kind. We will do experiments many of which are not possible with conventional photosynthesis. They will provide an in-depth knowledge-base for this new field, required to achieve three main aims:  to understand how these systems manage do the same difficult chemistry (split water and make the reactive chemicals needed to fix CO2) with less energy; to provide new insights to better understand the near-universal conventional photosynthesis; finally, to judge the feasibility of, and then to prepare the ground for, future engineering programs to put these traits into crops for more efficient food production.